The Surrey Morphology Group organized a SSILA session entitled “Inflectional classes in the languages of the Americas” for the 2013 Annual Meeting held during the LSA 2013 Annual Meeting in Boston, MA from 3 to 6 January 2013.

Inflectional morphology expresses grammatical information, and in an ideal world, each distinct form would correspond to a distinct meaning. But inflectional markers may also display apparently unmotivated morphological differences. Often such inflectional allomorphy pervades the entire paradigm so that a given word class falls into morphologically distinct inflection classes. Inflection classes are seemingly useless in functional terms, and yet they are widely found across languages and remarkably resilient over time.

By resisting a syntactic or phonological explanation, inflectional classes are in themselves an interesting object of study for a theory of language: they introduce into the linguistic system a layer of complexity which is purely morphological. This has motivated recent growth in research. See for example Ackerman et al. (2009), Finkel and Stump (2007), or Müller (2007) among others.

Nevertheless current knowledge of inflectional classes is still largely based on European languages and is thus limited by their typological characteristics. The languages of the Americas are notable for the richness of their morphology, but remain a largely untapped resource for the study of inflectional class systems, although a number of studies have indeed revealed layers of morphological complexity in some of these languages that go far beyond the requirements of syntax, such as for example Angulo (1933) and more recently Blevins (2005) and Campbell (2011), among others. These morphological structures in turn may interact with more general phonological and semantic principles. Such borderline cases reveal ways that allow inflectional classes to emerge in linguistic systems and ways that may help language users to maintain them over time. In this regard, studies based on lesser known languages can help to enhance our understanding of the role played by such factors in how inflectional classes operate.

Participants and papers
This session includes a selection of papers on a number of different indigenous languages of the Americas which will contribute to the building of a firm empirical foundation for the study of the relation between the lexicon and the morphology. The participants and titles of the papers of the session are the following:

1. Matthew Baerman, "Introduction"

2. Claire K. Turner and Suzanne Urbanczyk, "Determining Inflectional Classes in Central Salish" (Salish)

3. Jean-Pierre Koenig and Karin Michelson, "How complex can the paradigm for a single position class be?" (Iroquoian)

4. Emiliano Cruz Santiago, Víctor Vázquez Castillejos, Gabriela Pérez Báez and Mark Sicoli, "Inflectional classes and tonal morphology across 10 Zapotec languages" (Oto-Manguean, Zapotecan, Zapotec)

5. Emiliana Cruz and Anthony C. Woodbury, "Tonal complexity in San Juan Quiahije Chatino compound verb inflection" (Oto-Manguean, Zapotecan, Chatino)

6. Eric Campbell, "Tonal complexity in Zenzontepec Chatino verbal inflection" (Oto-Manguean, Zapotecan, Chatino)

7. Enrique L. Palancar, "Revisiting the conditioning and distribution of the subject suffixes in Lealao Chinantec" (Oto-Manguean, Zapotecan, Chatino)

These different papers tackle aspects of interest for a theory of inflectional classes. Papers (1) and (6) tackle the topic of what principles can govern lexeme class membership in inflectional classes for two very different language families, Salish and Chinantecan. Paper (2) on Iroquoian classes tackles the issue of the degree of predictability of class assignment from a given form in the paradigm, while paper (4) on San Juan Quiahije Chatino deals with the degree of inflectional overlap across the paradigms of different classes. Two more papers, (3) and (5), provide valuable insights onto how a diachronic approaches to tone, a characteristic exponent of inflectional contrasts in Oto-Manguean, can help understand the complexities behind the structure of inflectional classes in the Chatino language family or the large dialectal variation of the Zapotec family.

The session accommodates papers (1) and (2) on two language families of North America: Central Salish, a subgroup of the Salish family, and Iroquoian. The remaining four papers (3-6) are on languages from three different families of the Oto-Manguean phylum of Mexico. There is a reason that justifies the presence of four papers on Oto-Manguean languages for a session on inflectional classes. It is that Oto-Manguean languages commonly display an unparalleled richness of inflectional class systems which can both serve as a point of departure for investigating the full range of typological possibilities and provide important evidence of the limits of inflectional idiosyncrasy that a language can tolerate.

Session's schedule
The session will be a three-hour session. Each of six papers will be allotted a 25-minute slot: where 20 minutes will be for the presentation of the paper and the remaining five minutes for discussion. The session will begin with a 15 minute introduction by one of the members of the organizing committee who will provide the theoretical background for the relevance of the study of inflectional classes for the languages of the Americas. A 15 minutes break will divide the session in two halves: the first half including the introduction and papers (1) to (3); the second half including papers (4) to (6). This is indicated as follows, with a schedule of the session at a preliminary starting time of 2:00pm.

Total length: 3 hours

2:00-2:15 Intro by Matthew Baerman
2:15-2:40 Talk by Claire K. Turner and Suzanne Urbanczyk
2:40-3:05 Talk by Jean-Pierre Koenig and Karin Michelson
3:05-3:30 Talk by Emiliano Cruz Santiago, Víctor Vázquez, Castillejos, Gabriela Pérez Báez and Mark Sicoli
3:30-3:45 Break
3:45-4:10 Talk by Emiliana Cruz and Anthony C. Woodbury
4:10-4:35 Talk by Eric Campbell
4:35-5:00 Talk by Enrique L. Palancar

References cited
Ackerman, Farrell, James P. Blevins & Robert Malouf. 2009. Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms. In James P. Blevins & Juliette Blevins (eds), Analogy in grammar: form and acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54-82.
Angulo, Jaime. 1933. The Chichimeco Language, International Journal of American Linguistics 7: 152-194.
Blevins, Juliette. 2005. Yurok verb classes. International Journal of American Linguistics 71(3): 327-349.
Campbell, Eric. 2011. Zenzontepec Chatino Aspect Morphology and Zapotecan Verb Classes. International Journal of American Linguistics 77(2): 219-246.
Finkel, Raphael and Gregory T. Stump. 2007. Principal parts and morphological typology. Morphology 17: 39-75.
Müller, Gereon. 2007. Notes on paradigm economy. Morphology 17: 1-38.